Theobald's word "shows," in the sense of externals, is very nearly what Shakspeare meant by shoes, except that shoes implies a great deal more than shows,—it implies the assumption of the character as well as the externals of Hercules.
Out of five quotations from our old poets, given by Steevens in the first edition of his note, there is not one in which the shoes are not provided with feet. But Malone, to his immortal honour, was the first to furnish them with hoofs:
"Upon an ass; i.e. upon the hoofs of an ass."—Malone.
But Shakspeare nowhere alludes to feet! His ass most probably had feet, and so had Juvenal's verse (when he talks of his "satyrâ sumente cothurnum"); but neither Shakspeare nor Juvenal dreamed of any necessary connexion between the feet and the shoes.
Therein lies the difference between Shakspeare and "our old poets;" a difference that ought to be sufficient, of itself, to put down the common cry,—that Shakspeare borrowed his allusions from them. If so, how is it that his expositors, with these old poets before their eyes all this time, together with their own scholarship to boot, have so widely mistaken the true point of his allusion? It is precisely because they have confined their researches to these old poets, and have not followed Shakspeare to the fountain head.
There is a passage in Quintilian which, very probably, has been the common source of both Shakspeare's version, and that of the old poets; with this difference, that he understood the original and they did not.
Quintilian is cautioning against the introduction of solemn bombast in trifling affairs:
"To get up," says he, "this sort of pompous tragedy about mean matters, is as though you would dress up children with the mask and buskins of Hercules."
["Nam in parvis quidem litibus has tragœdias movere tale est quale si personam Herculis et cothurnos aptare infantibus velis.">[
Here the addition of the mask proves that the allusion is purely theatrical. The mask and buskins are put for the stage trappings, or properties, of the part of Hercules: of these, one of the items was the lion's skin; and hence the extreme aptitude of the allusion, as applied by the Bastard, in King John, to Austria, who was assuming the importance of Cœur de Lion!
It is interesting to observe how nearly Theobald's plain, homely sense, led him to the necessity of the context. The real points of the allusion can scarcely be expressed in better words than his own: